10 Risky Movie Moments That Totally Failed
A bold swing and a miss.
Filmmaking is an inherently risk-riddled business, with studios typically spending tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a project they believe - whether true or not - will be of interest to audiences at large.
But studios try to mitigate that risk by sticking to tried-and-true formulas with proven track records, and generally not letting filmmakers do anything too outside-the-box. Most of the time, anyway.
All the same, sometimes directors are able to let their freak flag fly and roll the dice on a creative flourish. While these gambles often pay off, sometimes they also fall totally flat and just don't work at all.
And so, inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the very subject, it's time to delve into those risky creative decisions which abjectly failed.
Whether they ruined the rest of the movie or simply torpedoed a single scene, each of these decisions left audiences scratching their heads and wondering what the hell the often-world-class filmmakers involved were thinking.
From dodgy digital de-aging to shockingly poor camerawork, unhinged casting choices, and everything else in-between, these movies all took bold swings that just didn't even remotely pay off...
10. Robert De Niro's Geriatric Fight Moves - The Irishman
Martin Scorsese's The Irishman ranks among the director's boldest and most ambitious projects, if only because he used comprehensive digital de-aging effects to have Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci portray the crime drama's central characters at numerous stages of their lives, often many decades apart.
For the most part, the effect is incredibly impressive and largely vaults over the uncanny valley, though there's one infamous, meme-worthy scene which painfully underlines the limitations of digital de-aging.
Beyond using CGI to make his actors appear younger, Scorsese bafflingly refused to use stand-ins for any scenes commanding a greater sense of physicality from the cast.
And so, for the sequence where a middle-aged version of De Niro's protagonist Frank Sheeran beats up a grocery store owner, it's painfully obvious we're watching a 70-something De Niro make a rather unconvincing, stiff-bodied attempt at pretending to assault someone.
No matter how persuasively someone's face can be de-aged by CGI, it can't disguise how age affects an actor's body, gait, and how they generally carry themselves.
And so, by having De Niro act out the scene himself rather than pasting his face over a middle-aged body double, the scene was rendered a pure laughing stock.
Above all else, why not just shoot the scene in close-up from below, rather than blatantly exposing De Niro's frailty in a flat wide?